Google announced today that it is shutting down iGoogle, which was a Protopage competitor.

Protopage launched in 2005 and is still going despite nearly every other start page shutting down or becoming derelict.

We were one of TechCrunch’s first ever posts on August 18th 2005 (after seeing we were the #1 most bookmarked site on delicious that weekend), and we’re still going strong!

http://techcrunch.com/2005/08/18/profile-protopage/

FYI, unlike other start pages that took huge amounts of venture capital and underwent forced sales, Protopage is completely independent and debt free, and we hope to be around to celebrate our 50th birthday one day if the internet is still around…

Due to popular demand, we’ve just released better support for tablets and larger smartphones, so that you have the choice between viewing the mobile version or the normal version of Protopage on your device.

We were previously automatically redirecting mobile devices and tablets to the mobile site, but we now present you with a choice when you visit protopage.com from those devices. As before, you can always reach Protopage mobile directly by going to protopage.com/mobile from your mobile device.

We’re pleased to announce two new Twitter widgets. You can now add your own or someone else’s Twitter feed to your page by clicking the ‘Add widgets’ toolbar button and then clicking ‘Add a twitter feed’. You can also add a Twitter Search widget, which displays the latest tweets on a particular topic or search term that you wish to follow.

In addition, there is a new ‘Add a map location’ feature, which allows you to easily add a Google Map for a location that you type in. Enjoy!

If you go to a Google Map in your web browser, you can click the “Link” icon (as indicated in the image above) and then copy the embed url. Then click ‘edit’ on a Google Maps widget on your Protopage and paste this into the “Web site address” field.

We’ve recently performed a server upgrade to increase our ability to serve our growing userbase. We continue to monitor and update the Protopage service to meet the needs of new web browser versions and new mobile phones, including updates for the latest batch of Android mobile phones. Thank you for continuing to use Protopage, where you can rely on us for decades to come!

We’ve just released some new tweaks to support the new Firefox 3.5 browser, and to allow the full range of rich text editing when using Google Chrome. For those of you in the northern hemisphere, hope you’re enjoying your Summer!

It has recently been announced that a competitor of ours, YourMinis, has shut down its start page, and we’ve had a number of emails asking nervously whether Protopage is safe.

We’re extremely lucky at Protopage to have very low costs and to not rely on venture capital or any external investors in order to provide our start page service. As far as we know, we’re unique in that we’re the only major start page that has not taken external capital.

Believe it or not, Protopage has now been live for over three years! We launched in August 2005, when we spent our first weekend as the #1 most bookmarked site on the “del.icio.us” bookmarks site. We’re cash flow positive, and we’d like to reassure you all that although we don’t always blog as often as we’d like, we’re here for the long run and we see no reason that Protopage will not still be around ten years from now. After all, we heavily rely on Protopage ourselves and that’s why we nurture it!

We’ve just launched a major update to Protopage, which includes brand new mobile features. Protopage Mobile has been specially optimized for dozens of mobile phones including the Apple iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Windows Mobile 5/6, HTC and Palm.

To access it, simply visit protopage.com/mobile on your phone.

News feeds are automatically optimized for download speed and for your phone’s screen dimensions. Protopage Mobile works great on both 3G and older 2G phones. You can speed up access to news feeds even further by disabling images from the ‘Edit settings’ link at the bottom of the Protopage Mobile page.

By popular demand, we now support column layouts that let you choose between 2,3,4 or 5 columns on your page. Uniquely, you can resize widgets to span multiple columns, which is useful for larger widgets and cartoon strips.

We’ve made a number of aesthetic and usability improvements, including an option for larger font sizes and simplifying the tab and toolbar system.

We’ve tested Protopage on a very broad set of phones, but please let us know if your particular model has any issues and we’ll see what we can do!

Please also let us know if you’ve spotted any bugs by using our feedback form. Thanks!

We’re currently working on our most requested feature – mobile access. You’ll be able to access all of your news feeds, search engines, bookmarks, notes, to-dos, calendar entries, photos and email inboxes from most mobile phones that have an integrated web browser.

We’ve also been releasing a number of bug fixes over the last few days, including tweaks to the auto-arrange functionality, and full international character set support for the tabs at the top of your page.

We’ve given the default color theme a spring clean – click ‘Load defaults’ from the ‘Colors / Settings’ button on your toolbar to preview the new blue sky look (but remember – only click the ‘Save’ button if you want to keep it as your new color theme)